Scientists contending within the “Jamesian open space”—Some readings

In A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), the philosopher Charles Taylor speaks of the “Jamesian open space…where the winds blow, where one can feel the pull in both directions.” [p. 592]

Most scientists who are spiritual or religious (or both) probably lean towards the scientific picture dominant within their discipline, even as they yearn towards the alternative:

[There are] those who want to opt for the ordered, impersonal universe, whether in its scientistic-materialist form, or in a more spiritualized variant, feel the imminent loss of a world of beauty, meaning, warmth, as well as of the perspective of a self-transformation beyond the everyday. The attraction of these cherished goods is closely linked to the past, often to the childhood of the chooser—which is, of course, what helps ultimately to discredit them. Even after the die is cast, the force of these rejected aspirations recurs in the form of regret and nostalgia. [p. 592]

Others may lean towards “at least some search for spiritual meaning, and often towards God.” But they too are buffeted by contrary winds.

These are haunted by a sense that the universe might after all be as meaningless as the most reductive materialism describes. They feel that their vision has to struggle against this flat and empty world; they fear that their strong desire for God, or for eternity, might after all be the self-induced illusion that materialists claim it to be. [p. 593]

To pilot one’s way within this “open space” of alternative world pictures, it can help to learn how variously others have navigated the terrain.

After the jump I list nine recent books that offer examples of how eighteen different scientists have dealt (often quite differently) with the contending pulls of science, on the one hand, and of religion or spirituality, on the other.

Clearing the summer backlog, 1

Event transcript from a conference sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life on “Religion and Science: Conflict or Harmony?” Speaker was Francis S. Collins, who was formerly the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and was recently sworn in as the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Hard to pigeonhole, Collins is an evangelical Christian, a firm believer in evolution and a critic of “intelligent design.” The responded is Barbara Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Religion Correspondent for National Public Radio and author of Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality (Riverhead, 2009). The audience was a group of national journalists and commentators.

God and Evolution

One good article—or in this case, one good guest op-ed contribution in The New York Times—can give you much of the thesis of a big 500-plus page book. In this case it is Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God (Little, Brown, and Company, 2009). Wright takes on the origins of the “human moral sense” and uses current speculation in evolutionary psychology about the origins of “reciprocal altruism” to make his argument.

Here’s Wright’s claim regarding militant atheists and equally militant religious believers:

These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.

If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.

What Good is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism?

What distressed sociologist Christian Smith when found in his teenage respondents–namely, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”–is now being advocated by one-time theocon and now critic of same, Damon Linker, as a “perfect..thoroughly anodyne, inoffensive, tolerant…civil religion of the highly differentiated twenty-first century United States.” Not surprisingly, other, more religiously or politically conservative commentators are not so sure (see, for example, Rod Dreher, James Poulos, and Ross Douthat). These exchanges were generated by the results of the ARIS and Pew Surveys and the subsequent cover article by Jon Meacham in Newsweek, all of which we’ve mentioned in earlier posts.

While these recent exchanges focus on what set of beliefs might make for a salutary (or at least not overtly dangerous) civil religion in America, they may also provoke some critical thinking about what might make for a salutary (or at least not dangerous and, shall we hope, in fact intellectually rigorous) lowest common denominator on American campuses.

Within the Jamesian open space

In A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor offers some thoughts on what it can mean to stand in the “Jamesian open space … where the winds blow, where one can feel the pull in both directions.” (p. 592)

Standing in the Jamesian open space requires that you have gone farther than this second state [that is, seeing that there is an alternative Wittgensteinian "picture" of the world available but having great difficulty making sense of it], and can actually feel some of the force of each opposing position. But so far apart are belief and unbelief, openness and closure here, that this feat is relatively rare. Most of us are at level one or two, either unable to see how the other view makes sense at all, or else struggling to make sense of it.